A Texan looks at Dubya

The combative Ronnie Dugger suggests we should Impeach or Indict Bush and Cheney Texas Observer 01/27/06 issue:

[W]e are living and working in the very days and nights of the American Emergency, the climactic American Crisis. Our elections are bought, and our government is run by and for the major transnational corporations. Bush announced in 2002 his illegal presidential policy that the United States can and will attack other nations first, waging war on them, when he so decides. He is now waging, as if he were doing it in our names, a bloody war of aggression against Iraq, which on the face of it is a crime against humanity under the Nuremberg principles that we and our allies established and enforced with hangings after World War II. The President, the Vice-President, and their factors sold this war to Congress with twistings and lies that were crafted to infuriate and terrorize us about Iraq’s alleged connections to Al Qaeda and mass-murder endangerments to us from Iraq itself, all of which literally did not exist. In polls now six of 10 Americans do not believe the president is honest. Yet he has three more years of dictatorial control over our nuclear and other arms and our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps and seems now to be maneuvering to use that control to wage another aggressive war on Iran, with literally incalculable consequences.

Oh, actually, he does provide some of that good news:

The national resistance to Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al., is coming into focus, too. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, which is the logical source for impeachment initiatives, has taken the significant step of calling for an investigation of Bush and Cheney with a view to censure, which obviously could metamorphose into impeachment. Tom Daschle, until recently the Minority Leader in the Senate, Sen. Edward Kennedy, and Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, are all calling for investigations of Bush and Cheney. Elizabeth Holtzman writes for impeachment in the current Nation, and the Internet is on fire with initiatives to impeach Bush and Cheney for crimes committed in office, foremost among them lying our nation into a war of aggression. Impeachment is unlikely as long as the House remains firmly in GOP control, but this year it would be gratifying to see citizens seeking the election of House candidates - whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents - who promise explicitly to vote, if elected, to impeach Bush and Cheney.

And he gives us a warning from the Texas experience of how Democrats laying down and playing dead in the face of Republican bullying and corruption is not likely to be a very productive course of political action:

Since 1994, although the polls show a majority of Texan citizens support progressive reforms such as adequate taxation for equal education for Texas schoolchildren, the leaders of the disappearing Texas Democratic Party and their statewide candidates, finking out on every ethically important political issue, have proved again and again that nothing fails like failure. Rot-gut Republicans have swept every statewide office and achieved mercenary domination of the Texas courts, too. In my opinion, Texas Democrats ought to have concluded by 2002 at the latest that they should be choosing, from among the waves of the on-comers, entirely new sets of state and local party leaders and candidates. For example, rather than be taken in, even a jot, by the torrent of contemptuous abuse directed at Ronnie Earle by Tom DeLay, his lawyers, and that ilk, Texans should be realizing that - just as the dramatic prosecutions of Thomas E. Dewey in New York made him a Republican presidential candidate and now the populist prosecutions of Eliot Spitzer in New York State are making him a national figure - Ronnie Earle has fully qualified himself as a front-rank leader in Texas politics. For another example, this year, in my opinion - shared, by the way, by Jim Hightower - Texans are very fortunate to have running for Attorney General the lifelong labor lawyer and Democratic firebrand David Van Os of San Antonio. The Observer does not make political endorsements, but I may say here for myself alone that David, in my carefully considered personal judgment, is the Ralph Yarborough of his generation.

The title of this post is a play on a notorious far-right pamphlet from the 1964 Presidential race, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, self-published by one J. Evetts Haley.  It complained about how the Chamber of Commerce was in bed with that infamous revolutionary organization, the AFL-CIO.  It was once used as a classic example ofcompletely frivolous and dishonest political writing.

But in these days of the junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh, FOX News and the Swift Boat Liars for Bush, it would qualify as a scholarly work.  Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if Regnery Press were to issue a revised edition.  (You can order a used copy through Amazon.com for $0.38.  Don't rush, though, they're not exactly a hot item.)